Sofie Grabol Is TV’s Savior of Denmark

If you watch much Danish television — and that is an option these days, wherever you happen to live — a question rises: How would Denmark function without Sofie Grabol?

In “The Killing” (“Forbrydelsen”), which put Danish TV on the map and made Grabol a star back in 2007, the country’s justice system was held together by her morose detective, Sarah Lund. In her two most recent series, Grabol expands her public-service portfolio. In “The Shift” she plays Ella, the head midwife at Copenhagen’s best public pediatric hospital. And in “Prisoner” she’s Miriam, a reform-minded guard at a prison threatened with closing. Whether she is catching Denmark’s murderers, delivering its babies or minding its inmates, Grabol is indispensable.

To follow Grabol’s progress through the Danish infrastructure, the American viewer will need the streaming service MHz Choice (free trials currently available), which carries “The Shift” (2022) and premiered “Prisoner” (2023) this week. The three seasons of “The Killing” are on the streamer Topic, which will merge with MHz Choice on April 1, consolidating this segment of Grabol’s catalog. (She also plays a public official in the eerie British series “Fortitude,” available on multiple streamers.)

The shows centered on Sarah, Ella and Miriam are quite different — “The Killing” is a lurid crime thriller, “The Shift,” a big-hearted medical soap opera, “Prisoner,” a grim social-problem drama — but the characters have much in common.

Each is aggrieved but indomitable, a working-class Sisyphus pushing ahead through institutional neglect and cowardice — a very squeaky wheel at work — while weighed down by personal trauma. Each is estranged from the only close family member still in her life; two become reluctant surrogate mothers to the women their troubled sons get pregnant. Perhaps Grabol has been typecast over the years, or has typecast herself. Or maybe the grouchy, standoffish, self-righteous pain in the butt is a character that resonates in Denmark.

Grabol is an economical actor, able to communicate a world of emotion through her liquid eyes and seemingly offhand movements. (She’s also blessed with a notably dramatic pair of eyebrows.) She makes all of these bottled-up, difficult women believable and, even when they push everyone away, sympathetic — you can see the layers of pain and weariness that they shelter behind and occasionally break through.